journal.coffee

The wintry air at four in the morning whistled as I sat on a bench sipping from a bottle of beer. The entire world was asleep; it seemed. No sound beyond the wind, a few dogs barking about, and the music humming softly in my ears. I sat on the bench, my feet on the railing as if I owned everything before me.

For a second, I believed it too because no one was there to question me or contest my outrageous claim. I laughed. It was all mine at that hour—the city with its lights, the hills and the trees, the sky with the gazillion stars; all mine. I sipped again, and I stared. I stared at the view in front of me.

Everyone I knew was asleep up in the rooms. I was there alone. I sat there staring, expressionless, only to be interrupted by my audacious thought again. It was mine: the navy blue sky, the moon, the lamp in front of me, the bench. No one could contest for anything at that hour. I laughed again. No one could do anything at all. They were all asleep, warm and cosy, sleeping snug in their beds. I couldn’t sleep.

That is why I had come down to sit on the bench anyway. Why else would someone come down into the cold? The world belonged to those who couldn’t sleep, irrespective of their own, personal whys. I stayed there for a few songs and until the pint lasted. I was there until the pint lasted. The songs were an excuse.

I went upstairs. The last draft of wind sent a shiver down my spine as I closed the door. I stared at my city from the large glass window in our room. Then, I poured myself the last of the leftover rum in a glass that already had some coke in it. I sat on the chair near the window, and I watched my sky.

No one could take it from me at four in the morning. I was the only one up. Everyone else was asleep. It was a silent night, just me, unable to sleep, a few dogs barking about, unable to sit quietly, and the few gusts of wind, unable to pass on the opportunity to make someone cold.

At some point, I dozed off, and when I woke up, I owned nothing again.

I was often nostalgic for the times. I didn’t miss a person or a place; I missed this feeling of my entire existence in the past. I missed the times, you know? I often missed a different self which isn’t around anymore. I wasn’t melancholic over it, but there was a longing in me that was ever-present. It stirred inside me on its own, and then, it didn’t leave for hours.

I forget trivial details almost immediately. More often than not, I’ve shown to have terrible memory. Often, for the life of me, I fail to recall some event or person. Other times, I muddle the details up. And yet, when I look back at the times, the general days, of how things used to be, of what I believed in, of what I did every day, of how I did what I did, of what I said, of those I knew, of who I trusted, of what made me tick, and what made me laugh, I can always form a clear picture.

It could be a phase that was present a few years ago. It could be a version of me from a decade ago. I’d be laughing one minute or be absorbed into my work, and all of a sudden, I’d feel a knock from who I used to be, and I’d fade into this daze of the past. I wasn’t sad, no, just wistful.

No matter how many years would pass, I’d always miss the times. there were more than a couple, too! I’d miss all of them, now and then, and I’d smile at all that, eventually. It’s absurd, really. We are alive to sit here, to look back and remember who we used to be, and disagree with ourselves in our own heads, and laugh at our older selves, and miss people who were once important to us. No one in particular, just people.

Do you miss the times too? If you do, you’d know that often you didn’t miss anything in particular. It wasn’t a fancy aroma or a catchphrase or anything remotely as specific as you’d read in a book or see in a movie. It was just a feeling that a lot of time has passed since you took your first breath, and you’ve been so much since, and you’ll be so much now, and that you’re still going.

Perhaps, it was a reminder of precisely that; you’re still going.

I kept going back to that evening, you know? It was raining. We were in your car. I was listening to you talk, but my eyes were focused on the wiper moving back and forth on the windshield.

The wiper would clear the drops, and more would arrive, and it’d come back to clear them, and more would arrive. What a sad state of affairs, at first, and yet, that’s the one thing it was good at: wiping the drops.

I heard you say something confusing, some bullshit about the universe and how our lives aren’t just our own. “You’ll be the death of me if this keeps happening every year,” I chuckled.

You’ll be the death of me. What a sad thing to say to someone you love, at first, and yet, that’s the one thing you can muster out loud when you’re exhausted, when you’re tired of trying.

“It’s you who has to choose, love, the universe gives up too,” I said, and looked at you, helplessly, and saw all those years at once—coincidence upon coincidence, chance upon chance.

I saw us missing each other every single time. Sometimes, by just a day! Year by year, I saw you leave things in the hands of fate. What a sad thing to leave your life in the hands of, at first, and yet, it’s the only thing you have ever done.

I kept going back to it, you know? I kept going back to staring at that wiper on your fucking windshield, clearing the drops blindly, mechanically, fanatically. I heard you decide for the both of us—the decision being no decision at all.

I like to believe I never saw you after that night, even though I ran into you once. Perhaps, that was the last chance, but I never got up to talk to you. I haven’t decided how I feel about that yet. Maybe, it was a mistake?

I kept going back to that evening, though. I never saw you since. The windshield has popped into my head every single time it has poured since. Until I passed by that fork in the road the other day, and it started raining. It made me recall your bullshit of the universe. I stood there dolefully.

Then, I reckoned, the universe grew tired. I knew it would, at some point. I’m sure it had better things to do.

I smiled, realising: so did I.

“I’ll write a book about how much I love you,” I told you all those years ago. That was when you loved me, too. Years have gone by, and the more I think about it, the more I feel, I don’t want to write that book. I don’t want to write about us. There’s no story. At least, not something that wasn’t written countless times before we were even born.

Love was a trampled carpet, stamped over and over with shoes and feet of all shapes and sizes. We weren’t anything new or unique, as much as we would have believed at the time. Even in the ending of things, it turned out exactly like an old poem would, with an abrupt hyphen, and a last line that felt too short for something as important as the last word.

I wonder if I’ll ever write about you beyond these fragments straight out of my head, and booze or exhaustion. I wonder if you’ll ever read them. I’m not going to write that book, though. I’m sorry. I just wanted you and the world to know that. Love was a stale prompt, an over-celebrated festival that had lost its charm, a mediocre piece of fiction, at best. The only love that was worth writing about was the one that stuck, the one that stood the test of time and chaos, and I have none of it to talk about.

Even if I did, when you have a love like that, you barely have time to tell anyone about it. You’re too busy being in love, being giddy with the overwhelm of everything lovely in your life—squirrels surfing on rainbows and all. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen it. Some of us have felt it. Fewer have managed to keep it. I aimed to be in those few.

So, I won’t write about you or me or us or anything that happened simply because everyone knows this: love is silent and patient and kind, and love stays, and love tries; it is heartbreak that howls the loudest on a cold winter night. We were just wolves hungry for love, us writers, tired of leading the pack astray. We were fickle. We didn’t write about love when we truly loved someone. We kept it all to ourselves, for ourselves.

We knew we had howled long enough.

We do weird shit when we’re heartbroken, man. We get drunk. We end up in fights. No, not just with people. There was this one time I had an ongoing spat with a city. Can you believe it? An entire city, filled with hopes and dreams and people, and I hated it—all of it.

And then, another city, and then, this very town that I once called home. Then, a song I couldn’t bear. The more I look at it, the more I realise that I was fucked up, man. We all were, and we all are, and we’ll always be fucked up. That’s the deal.

This is the first time a species is doing this—thinking. No one before us has done this, so we’re bound to fuck up, and fight with pieces of music as if that makes any sense, but we do it. We do it all the time. We go out every day, finding things to live for—a job, a person, whatever—and all those dreams fail.

They fail, and then we try again. Maybe you will get what you want if you keep evolving, if you keep admitting that you are fucked up, and that you’ll be okay. They went hand-in-hand, man. You had to be both at the same time. That’s how it worked.

One day, as you come back home and turn the radio on, the song comes up. You pause for a second between plunging that french press, and you smile. You listen to that song. This is the first time you’ve done that. It’s the first time you’ve discovered this beautiful piece of music. It cannot just be about something as petty, you shrug. It transcends all that. So, you finish making your coffee, and you realise you’ve evolved.

You learn that you cannot not try again because of that one time. That one time that it didn’t work out, whatever it was that you wanted didn’t up and land in your lap. You can’t close yourself to the entire spectrum of human experience because of one time. Life is much bigger than one time.

One day and that might be today, you’ll be sitting and looking back. You’ll see these horrible, detestable events that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies, but you’d also smile. You’ll know you wouldn’t be there, having coffee, if all that didn’t happen.

You’ll be glad it happened. You wouldn’t have made it to the other side. You wouldn’t have evolved. You won’t have it any other way.

Why I do what I do? Well, the answer is hidden in why I walk, but to get there, you must walk with me. Ah, you’re here already. You know the first thing I do whenever I move somewhere is to walk in the neighbourhood—even when I’m travelling. It’s one of the best ways to understand a place. When you’re moving too fast, say, in a taxi, you often see people, but you miss their faces.

You see that old man there? He likes sitting at the bus stop every day at around six-thirty. I know he likes sitting there because he’s not in a hurry to catch the bus. Instead, he’s always sitting there with his legs folded. I wonder what he waits for, but I never ask him. I just nod. He nods back.

I look forward to seeing—careful! There’s no sign, but there’s a hole in the sidewalk. They never closed it. You wouldn’t know, you barely take any walks, especially in this part of town. That’s okay. It’s why I make sure I always tell people about the pit here.

Anyway, as I was saying, the first thing I do is take a walk in the neighbourhood. You make friends that way. There’s a group that loads their truck right down the block. One day, I stopped and offered to help them. I admit I wasn’t much help that day, but now we just all smile and nod at each other.

Around the corner, you’ll find a few cabbies who I’ll smile at when we cross the road. I often get a cab here when I don’t have the luxury to walk. Oh, yes, it is a luxury. It is a luxury to go somewhere in your own time. I’m not like a lot of other walkers. They only walk for leisure. To me, leisure is part of it, part of it is getting where you’re going. I believe, if you go too fast, you miss stuff.

I often help people with directions. I’ve realised they only stop to ask those who are walking fast, like us right now, because we know where we’re going. The café is just around the corner. You see, people need someone who knows where they’re going but not going there fast. That is, in fact, why I prefer walking. There has to be someone slow enough to help others with directions.

Ah, we’ve reached the coffee shop. It’s cold. Let’s go inside. Oh, you want to sit outside. Well, that works for me. We’ll sit outside.

They lay down in the grass as the pale, winter sun tried to reach their faces through the disparate leaves of the tree right above them. One of them, with his back clinging tightly to the tree, held a few blades of the grass between his fingers, turning them. The other was on the ground, one of his arms crossed below his head, and the other raised.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What are you trying to do?” The first one asked, continuing to spin those blades of grass, now bruised with being turned continually.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“I’m trying to grab something,” the other answered.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What?”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Life,” he said. Then, opened his palm and eclipsed the flare of the sun peeking through the countless leaves on that tree. He closed his palm, as if he were grabbing that flare, and made a fist.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Did you know, chimpanzees can’t climb branches?”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What do you mean? Chimpanzees live in trees.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Yeah, they do, but they can’t climb branches from the get-go. They try a lot, and most of them continually hit the forest floor. Then, they get up and try again. Some die, of course, or get injuries, but many persist and become the chimpanzees we know as chimpanzees. Adept. Dexterous. I want to be a chimpanzee, man. I mean, it is so easy, just so easy to say that the world is against me, that everything conspires to make sure I couldn’t get what I want. It was the easiest thing to fall down on the leaves, and blame the branch or the tree or even gravity. It was the easiest thing to do. It was so much harder, downright impossible even, to get up and climb that tree again, to believe that the world was working for me. To believe that I would make it, that I would climb my branch, whatever that may be, and that I’d swing from it and go to another. To believe that one day, I’d keep going on and on. It was hard to believe that, but it was worth it, man. I want to grab life by the throat, pull it close and whisper in its ear: I’m not afraid of falling.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“You’re weird, man. You know that, right?” ⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Yes, I’m aware.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
He kept looking up, trying to take his share of the sun after the countless leaves had taken their own.

“I think that’s a good thing”, he smiled.

Don’t fall in love with these words I write. I want to be honest, love, and tell you the truth. The truth is that these are average words. There are better ones out there, and trust me when I tell you, I’m an average bloke, with an average life, really. Nothing about me or my day is extraordinary, and I don’t intend to change that.

I wear the same clothes every day, do the same things every day, and I never get tired of it. The incredible sense of awe you spoke of after reading a piece I wrote was something you brought to it. I only write about the things I see, in words as plain as the paper I start writing them on. Then, I forget about them altogether.

I pay an extra ounce of attention to something, sometimes, and then come home and hack away at my desk for a while, until something resembling a paragraph pops out. When that happens, I go back to the typical day. I sip coffee by myself in a café at eleven in the night in the cold of winter because I’m used to it.

I’m used to being by myself. There’s nothing romantic or cinematic about it. It’s just how I do things, and trust me: you’ll get tired with how I do things. I’m either too caffeinated or too drunk all the time. I’ve much forgotten what I feel like when I’m neither. I don’t intend to find out anymore.

I oscillate between having so much to do that my head explodes and being so exhausted that I can barely get out of my bed. I’m no saint either. I lie, a lot, especially in these words. It’s not a lie per se. It’s either the exaggeration or the omission of some truth.

The “me” you’ll find when you spend time with me will be tedious and aggravating on most days. I’d ask you not to touch things in my apartment. I’d listen to the same music always. I’d run around the flat and the city, frantically, talking about some half-assed epiphany.

So, don’t fall in love with these words I write. I can be difficult; I’m sure you’re the same. I’m not a metaphor. I’m a guy in a sweatshirt sitting alone in a coffee shop. I’m sure you get it by now. Don’t fall in love with these words I write, love, the joke will be on you. Truth be told, the blame too.

You’ll expect the world of me, and I’ll expect nothing of you.

It was sometime in the afternoon when I decided to lie down for a bit. I was all ready to go out and do things and work a little and meet a friend, and yet, I decided to lie down. The day was young, but I was tired. Five minutes, that’s all I wanted. I lay on the couch.

I think I was about three minutes in when I realised that I was dozing off, and that was when I realised I was halfway between being asleep and awake. With no rhyme or reason, I started dreaming of you. I hadn’t thought of you in ages, so I’m not sure how that happened. I hadn’t missed you at all.

I knew I had to get off that couch. There was work to do. Yet, it was you, and for the life of me, I couldn’t get up. I hadn’t heard your voice in a long time. It’s funny how the brain remembers everything, even things you never said, even things that never happened. We’re funny creatures. Little monkeys with irrelevant lives, watching irrelevant movies in our little heads about things that didn’t happen.

For what it’s worth, we were older in the dream, and we were walking alongside a hilly road like we used to do. We talked like we used to, and it seemed like a typical day. Well, for us that were in the dream. For me, I’d barely call that typical. I’ve spent years with you around, and it’s been years without you about, and I still don’t know what typical is when it comes to us.

I wasn’t asleep yet. I wanted to get up. Then, you pulled me by my hand and asked me to look at a flower. I laughed and asked you to slow down. You always got so excited. We kept walking, and I kept trying to get off the couch, not wanting to stay on that road, to stay in that dream. I knew I was exhausted, so if I gave in now, I wouldn’t wake up for hours. There were things to do and people to see, and this was a waste of my time. The day waited to be seized.

Then, I said something, and you laughed. You had to laugh. What could I have done? I couldn’t help it anymore. So, I gave in. I hadn’t heard you laugh in a long time. I kept looking at you, smiling. That was the moment. I could stay there forever. Life could wait, work could wait, the entire universe could wait.

I would fight them all, I mumbled, dozing off.

I realised a while ago that the feeling of angst was like a door. As long as the door remained closed, you could live your entire life and never feel vulnerable, not knowing what they talk about when they talk about wanting to die. Once you opened it, though, even if just to take a peek out of curiosity, things escape out of it. Even if you shut it quickly, you’ve let them out.

Now, they’ll hide in plain sight: the monsters, the voices, the sheer feeling of pointlessness. They’ll wait in the corner of the room you’re in, on the road you walk on and in the café where you laugh. They’ll always be there. They’ll never leave. They’ll wait for a bad day or a heartbreak or even you dropping a cup of coffee, and they’ll come out.

Until one day, when you’re in a crowded city where no one really knows you, and you’re crossing the road, you’ll see a car approaching. You’ll see the car getting bigger, and you’ll want to move, but somehow, your legs would listen to them instead. They’ll tell them to stay put. Your legs will comply. It isn’t until the last moment when it’s already too late that you’ll get your agency back, and you’ll tell your legs to move out of the way.

It’ll be too late though, and as you brace for impact, you’ll realise that everyone lies when they say your entire life flashes before you die. Nothing flashes. You just think about how you wanted to move, and that now it’s too late, and that you should’ve never opened the door when you did, and that a peek did hurt.

If you’re as lucky as I was, the car will swerve, and you’ll hear some verbal slurs, and nothing will happen. Nothing will happen, and you’ll begin to cry. You’ll begin to cry in the middle of the road. Then, you’ll get to safety, and you’ll cry some more, and then, you’ll promise yourself to never let them win.

You’ll spend every day making sure the monsters are asleep, and the voices are never heard. You’ll know they’re sitting right there, you’ll know they’re walking with you, and you’ll know the next time the car won’t swerve. You’ll know you should’ve never let them out, and yet, now that they’re here, you’ll learn how to shut them up.

Then, you’ll be happy.

Talk about how you feel, talk about how you feel, oh fuck off. I don’t want to talk about how I feel anymore. Most people wait on to listen to some massive, life-spanning, overarching narrative—a heartbreak, a disease, an I-don’t-care-what.

You see, I could handle the big stuff, the events that unfolded in years, I had my grip on that all too clearly. I was too smart to not throw my life away and so, things usually worked out.

It was in the little things—the everyday stuff, the difficult conversations, the tedious people, the aggravating inconveniences; they fazed me, continually. I’d bear with most of them for the day, but towards the end, they’d be the ones spinning in my head, as it spun because of one pint too many.

I was heartbroken for years, I could handle another month. I had been clueless for decades, I could handle another year. It was the argument with a friend or something a stranger said or something I saw on the street that broke me usually, and that was too casual for you.

I don’t want to talk about how I feel. I want to call a friend and not say a word. I wonder how many will allow that before they call me insane?

So, spare me the bullshit. You don’t want to hear about how I feel. You want to listen to a story. You like hearing stories so you could use the platitude you read on a blog recently. Then, take the fact that you made someone feel heard today and put it on a plaque as you go to sleep, believing you’re a good person.

You really don’t want to hear anyone. You just want to be amused, and you want to feel useful, and for that, you can find someone else.

If you can sit in silence with me for a while, without you wanting me to put words to how I feel, maybe then, I’ll sit with you, and maybe just then, once we’re both done feeling how I feel, I’d tell you what bothers me. You won’t do that, though. No one would.

All everyone ever wanted were fucking stories and words, and all everyone ever wanted was to doze off believing they were heroes. I wasn’t going to give them that. I could save myself.

I told you, I could handle the big stuff, the long-drawn journeys. I had saved myself on countless days before—one more wouldn’t kill me.

The more I think about it, and trust me, love, I do that a lot, I think I clearly remember when I stopped loving you, and no, it wasn’t when I said I did. It was much, much before that. It was when I was telling you about this shoebox I had once upon a time. That I called it “the shoebox of memories”.

I remember telling you that I kept every tiny object that made me who I am today in it. Until, the box started to overflow, and so I decided to let it all go, but not until I took photos of everything, before I threw it in the can. I remember I was showing you the album instead. It’s hazy now, but I could see you listening intently, and I mean, why wouldn’t you or anyone?

But then, I saw your disinterested eyes, and so, I let the shoebox fade away into the conversation. Before I knew it, we were talking about how great the pasta was in that café overflowing with blinding white furniture and pastel pink flowers. It looked posh on the outside, quite perfect, really, but the pasta didn’t taste as good. I lied that day when I said the pasta was perfect or when I said I loved you.

I’m not sure why I did that, but I know why I stopped talking about the shoebox. It wasn’t because of your disinterest in it, which, I’m not even sure was there. It was because I realised I was stuck in the past and everything that had happened before. As much as I had let the shoebox go and put it on my phone, I was still amidst those trinkets, revelling in the stories of the old, and who I was and could’ve been.

I believe you realised that on the cab ride home too. After that, it was us fighting all the time. It was you berating me for hours. It was me not talking to you at all. I’d tell you of my drab day, and nothing more, and you’d tell me of yours. A cliché!

I think it all goes back to that day. I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d talked about that instead of the pasta. I think about that a lot every time I’m making some. I clicked a photo of it the other day and added it to the album on my phone—I barely check it now—I just add things to it out of habit.

Truth be told, I scrolled through it the other day, and I had forgotten half the stories. I wonder if that means something.

I’m continually following myself around. There’s this, and it might sound odd, but there’s this metaphysical visualisation, this weird idea that I have always had. The idea is that time is something I don’t want to believe in as a concept.

Perhaps, it’s because I have always felt as if I was on a treadmill or an abstract tunnel, but it wasn’t just me on it. It was every version of me that has ever existed, and that ever will. It’s me always running to catch up to myself.

I didn’t exist because I was all of those people. I was my own standard, my own yardstick to measure any growth at all. Nobody mattered because I was always on the treadmill. No one could tell me whether there was a right or a wrong because the only direction I had was who I could be and who I had been.

It was my younger self looking at my current self and thinking: I want to be that person; it was my present self looking to this idea for my older self and wondering: how do I get there? All of it happening together.

I realised at some point, the only way to go forward was to be your own role model. I want the kid inside me to know that the people he thought should exist, in fact, do, and always have. I want to be one of those people, and hopefully pick some others like me as I go along. I guess, I have always looked at it that way.

There is no me. I don’t exist. Just the reflection, the ephemeral silhouette of what I call my life on the treadmill of how we perceive time, running one after the other, not knowing which came first. All of my selves—past, present, future—existing together.

I’m a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of myself through the metaphorical tunnel. I was always running after myself, ahead of myself, continually. Nothing else matters. Nothing else came close.

Nothing could, not even myself.

On most days, I hated reading anything I had written before. I’d read something I wrote years ago and I’d get this feeling of detachment. As if I hadn’t written it in the first place. As if it was a vague memory that I could remember the presence of but not its details.

It stood there, like smudged marks of graphite that said something important once upon a time but are now reduced to a blur. If you looked closely, you’d see the lines etched on the paper, provided you were lucky it left a recognisable mark. Otherwise, it was lost.

I regretted sharing everything, in hindsight. Once a word was out, it wasn’t my own. It was yours. It was your neighbour’s. It belonged to your friend. Your sibling played with it, aimlessly. It was everyone’s and it was out. It was a part of my life handed into countless hands by myself.

So, no matter how much I wanted it to be the case, on some days with some words, I often wished I’d never written them. Some things should’ve been my own. You should’ve never known of them. Of course, I can’t take the words back. They were out there, forever. That was writing.

Although, I wonder if memories aged better if they were behind windows of glass or fences of metal—visible yet out of reach. I wonder if you could record them like that, keeping some parts of them with yourself, forever, never to be shared, and yet, spilling everything else.

I wonder if it was possible to write like that—without telling everyone everything. I wonder if I would ever figure it out. I’ll have to keep going as I have been—giving it all away—until I do.

Tell me, what do you make of irony?

There was nothing to tell. I had nothing to tell anyone. I had no story, and people told them all the time. It wasn’t like I didn’t live a life worth talking about. Far from it, on most days. Yet, I didn’t have what it takes to tell a story, you know?

A great war, a great tragedy, a great issue, a great struggle; I didn’t have anything. I was just a guy who had learned to string two sentences together. That was it. I was the guy who wrote, but I wasn’t a guy who was for something, anything.

I had no story to tell. There was a semblance of the classic tropes from rags to riches, to the great romantic tragedy, to the valley boy in the big city, but they were all lukewarm; I liked lukewarm, too. At least, when it came to my coffee. You could hold the cup from any side if it was lukewarm. That’s how I held my life too—not too strongly, not too tightly, and not too carefully. I liked it lukewarm.

I didn’t have a burning passion or a story worth telling. I was just a guy who had learned to string two sentences together who took a walk every day. Then, came home and wrote about it. There was nothing to tell, and all I had told already was all I would ever tell anyone, and that meant never telling a story because if there was a story in me, it was in the untold.

I was less than any of those who came before and those who will come after. That was my greatest disappointment—to somewhat know how to write, and have nothing to write about. They had so much to talk about. Everyone around me had an agenda. And here was I, sitting in a café by myself, looking at a cup of coffee and reading a book, thinking about nothing of significance.

That was all I wanted to do, and all I would ever do. I had just learned to put words together. I was the wrong person to have done that. Thousands were better than me. There were millions of them with their stories. I had nothing to tell anyone, and yet, I was the one writing.

When I imagine what the inside of my head looks like, I often imagine a large hall with bookshelves and cupboards filled with neatly filed books and notes. The cupboards and shelves are split into three rows for the three different roles I tend to play in the every day. Each row of cupboards is followed by a dimly lit desk. All three desks are identical. I see myself sitting on any one of those at a given point in time, getting up intermittently to walk around the hall, and referring to the respective cupboards, and through them my notes.

I see a fireplace with a chair to sit on for all the times I’m not sitting at any of the desks. I see myself sitting there a lot. More often than not, though, a sort of haze enters through the window. The hall, usually warm and amber, gets an aura of blue and immediately becomes bleaching and blinding white. Suddenly, the cupboards are invisible and only the cracks of the fire are audible, and I can’t see anything. I’m unable to find the desks and the fireplace; the fog starts to get heavier.

So, I find myself standing in one place when I should be very well sitting at a desk or on the chair. I find myself standing there, stuck, for days. I can’t seem to find the door and window either to fully revel in the cluelessness of the mist. The haze comes and goes on its own but often, it overstays its welcome. The haze leaves eventually as it had arrived—on its own.

It gets a bit tedious to stand there alone for days unable to do, think, record anything; the fog is too thick usually and I feel lost inside my own head. So, while on the outside I’m functioning, I can’t remember what I should for I can’t find my notes, and I can’t find answers for I need my desks for that, and I can’t find solace because my chair isn’t around.

The haze comes without an alarm, and those around me can’t see it, of course. So, to them I appear a bit aloof and uncaring, which is of course different from what has actually happened. While on the outside, it appears as if I’m spacing out, lost in thought a lot, it stands to reason and rightly so, that I’m usually just lost. It is indeed a terrible misunderstanding

I don’t know who you are or whether we’ve met before, but I wanted to talk to you about music. I was walking the other day on the all-too-familiar streets when I found myself listening to the piano in my ears.

Nothing too snobbish, really, just some pieces of the piano playing. I couldn’t care less for the names. While some of it felt all-too-classical and made the streets feel like a slippery slope to pretentiousness, it was mostly grounded to my shallow depth.

You know me, I can pretend to be all deep and introspective. But in truth, I’m just a regular bloke who learned to watch people from afar. They tell you everything if you watch them from afar. It is when they’re close that they have the luxury to lie.

As the tracks played in my ears, I felt a sudden melancholy happiness, as ironic as that sounds, come from within me. I was cheery, but I was also despondent.

I’ve learned that just because some emotions don’t make sense in the language we use, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. I believe when we face such feelings, we must go out of our way to invent new phrases instead of morphing our emotions into those we have handy.

In my experience, those are the only times we truly feel something; the times when we don’t have a word for how we feel is when we don’t jump to the shortcut of calling it something. We have to feel it thoroughly to feel it for the first time.

So, I felt it all, and I let it come. The traffic appeared to be moving at its own speed, but the piano made it go slower. I could hear the horns, the loud conversation, the cacophony, but it wasn’t jarring anymore. If anything, it made me smile.

The city was the piano, and I felt as if I was walking on its keys. Perhaps, that’s what music does, you know? It makes us create a reality of our own, and for me, I can’t not feel what I felt that evening whenever I walk in this city now.

That makes me wonder, though. Maybe I’ll never meet you in the same city, whoever you are. Perhaps, I’ll meet you in the same song someday. I guess, it’s a thought as good as any, and that’s a good place to meet as any. Yes, I’ll meet you in the same song someday.

I wonder, though, whether we’ve already met.

For a lot of people, and for good reasons they had on the tip of their tongues, it was the worst time to be alive. It was scary, and you could die whenever. There was chaos in the air, wafting through the ochre landscape of autumn.

It didn’t matter if it was the year or just life, in itself. Life was as dreary and dry as the brown and orange leaves, but for what it’s worth, they convinced themselves it was the year. It made sense too, for most of us.

For some of us, we had begun this year on a note that was a tad bit higher than our usual. For some of us—for me—I had let go of my cynicism. It was the year I was supposed to fall in love with everything I could possibly fall in love with.

I remember: on a cold January morning, ecstatic and overflowing with warmth, I felt the sun and decided to look for hope. The world had all of us by the throat, but I was going to smile anyway. That is what I had decided, and that is what I was going to do.

People were good. The world was inherently a good place. It was a mess, sure, but it has been messier before. I was done with the heralds and the news and my general belief that everyone was out to get me. Even if they were, they were fewer. There were more of us. I had to believe there were more of us. There ought to be more of us.

Then, the year passed in a blink of an eye as we stayed inside our little boxes in little buildings, given we had a box to be locked up in. Suddenly, it was autumn already, and the leaves turned auburn and started to die.

Another January was around the corner, and they said it was the worst time to be alive, and yet, I couldn’t shake the sun off. I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t help but hope. It took me a lot of time to get here, you see, and I couldn’t give that up. No matter what happened, this was the year I recovered from perpetual hopelessness.

You’d know what I mean if you felt it too. Hope digs deeper into those who have forgotten how selflessly the sun shines. Once its roots set in, you can’t give it up that easy. It won’t let you pull itself out, end of the world or otherwise.

You’d know if you knew. You’d know I wasn’t going to give it up that easy. I had felt the sun.

Let me tell you about the city where nothing ever happens. Before it was a city, it was still a town, and I was a boy. When I was a boy, I believed this place to be too small. There was nothing but trees, a handful of people, and going to school was an excursion.

So, I left the town where nothing ever happened. What was I supposed to do here, anyway? If you didn’t like walking in the morning and talking to the neighbours, what would you do?

I left, like most people I knew who were coming of age—I had dreams of my own. I would return, though, every fortnight or so, for the world was too large, and the cities too brutal. The cacophony was overwhelming; the town was a warm hug you could always count on.

So, I needed a place where nothing ever happened. I needed to find a bench in a park all too familiar to most of us, and I needed to sit there, and I needed to sip my coffee and not be bothered anymore.

Until, one day, I came back all grown up, dragging my luggage behind me, and I didn’t see the town. It was a city, alright. Perhaps, as I was growing, the town was growing too. I hadn’t noticed it at all.

So, I found myself broken beyond repair, and for some reason, the town felt broken too. Both of us were yet to be at peace with the tragedies of being cut in places; to learn that while being cut was necessary, it hurt nonetheless. Grown as we were, we parted our ways.

It wasn’t until I decided to come back one day, calmer. It was then that I compared our scars. I found that just like myself, it had found its warm new corners where innocent trees once stood. I realised that the town didn’t hurt anymore, and neither did I.

So, like old days, we spent time together again, and the walks didn’t feel strange, and neither did those you once knew. So, began an inside joke, and we didn’t want anyone to know the truth. I started calling it the city where nothing ever happened—I lied.

True, nothing ever happened here. Well, nothing of significance for the world, perhaps. But for us, it was everything; it was where everything happened. It was where a town became a city, and a boy became a man.

Come to think of it, what else could have happened anyway?

I knew a lot of people who were difficult to understand. I wasn’t like that. I was a simple person, or at least I strove to be one. In my experience, everyone else was extremely convoluted, and so that’s what they sought in others, failing to truly reach any understanding at all.

I was an anomaly then because I said how I felt and I did what I said. Well, I tried to, at least. I was a glitch because I was exactly what sat in front of people. Nothing about me was out of the ordinary because I simply had better things to do than lie or deceive or try to be someone I was not. That made me extremely unlikeable quite often. As I grew, I learnt to be okay with that trade-off.

As fond of conversation as I was, there was a lot I never said. I said what I said because I truly believed it. That didn’t mean I wasn’t wrong often. I was wrong all the time, but not when people said I was, almost never then. If you were to get to know me, you’d have all of the inner workings of my head in these words alone, and for most people, I knew that was enough.

So reading was the best bet for a lot of people who came across me. Even if you read it all, you’d not know everything, but that would be a good place to start. We could talk then, and I’d assume you would come with some sort of understanding about who I was, and then, I would break it all apart. Perhaps, it was one thing to know about me, about how I did things, about how I acted, about who I was, about where I was from.

Maybe it was another to know me. If you wanted to know me, all you’d have to do was ask, and I’d tell you everything. That’s what people never did. They never asked. They were too busy playing around with narratives in their head, and their opinion for how the world worked. They were always wrong.

In any case, to know me, all you’ll have to do is ask, and I’ll smile, then tell you everything there was to know. To know me, all you have to do is look carefully, and I’ll spill it all, without uttering a word. To know me, you’ll first have to have me let you in. Otherwise, you’re stuck with knowing about me, and for that, you have these words and your reasoning for the world.

What then do you need me for?